1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of contact center technologies and, more particularly, to enhancing contact centers with dialog contracts.
2. Description of the Related Art
A contact center is a functional area used by one or more organizations to handle inbound/outbound communications with customers. During a contact center interaction, a caller can be transferred from an automated response component to a contact center agent, who possesses an expertise corresponding to a caller's need (i.e., skills based routing). Often a contact center agent is paid, rewarded, or penalized based upon a quantity, a quality, and a duration of their interactions with callers. Agent monitoring components of a call center are designed to acquire and record agent specific interaction metrics.
Conventional agent monitoring techniques are unable to automatically make quality determinations. At present, agent calls are often monitored by a live supervisor who subjectively determines a quality of a communication session between the caller and the agent. Alternatively, at least a portion of agent/caller interactions are recorded, where the recordings are analyzed by a live supervisor or quality assurance technician who makes subjective determinations of quality of analyzed calls. Both of these techniques are highly deficient. First, it can be expensive and time consuming to have quality assurance personnel or supervisors analyze calls. Additionally, live monitoring by supervisors is typically performed against a minute portion of overall calls handled by a call center resulting in the deficiencies of unmonitored calls remaining undetected. Recording calls for later analysis can require large amounts of storage, computing processing power, and human agent analysis time. Further, neither technique aids in the live interaction process to guide an agent to improve quality of a live interactive session.
The problem with monitoring quality is due in part to the fact that contact agent/caller interactions are free form interactions. That is, neither party is contextually constrained, as they are when interacting through Web based forms or a scripted Interactive Voice Response (IVR) dialog. Unconstrained or free form interactions between a contact center agent and a caller can be voice-based interactions (e.g., telephone interactions), text exchange interactions (e.g., chat communications, instant messaging communications, and/or text messaging communications), multimodal interactions, or video teleconferencing interactions.
What is needed is a technique to automatically evaluate quality of a free form contact center interactions. Preferably, this technique could be implemented in a preventive manner to guide a contact center agent to improve a communication session's quality while the session is active. It would also be advantageous if the technique operated without requiring communication sessions to be recorded, which could result in significant savings related to quantities of needed computing resources.